


Footprints

by i3ernadette



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 20:51:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/828739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i3ernadette/pseuds/i3ernadette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dying telepath brings the Doctor's attention to a few truths, including the return of a companion thought forever lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Footprints

"You think yourself so wise, Doctor." The calm, soothing voice drew part of his attention from the machinery he was tweaking. With a few adjustments - yes! That, exactly - he should be able to re-route the processing power from the secondary maintenance system and into the slaved life-support unit that the telepath's care-takers had already constructed, allowing the aging human another few hours of life.

"What's that, then?" He asked disinterestedly, hands and sonic screwdriver busily rummaging through the nest of wires under the console.

"It is not wisdom, Doctor, but fear that keeps you from her."

The sonic screwdriver clattered against the steel grating.

"From whom?" He asked, voice tight. His head was still bent, but his spine was rigid.

"Your Rose, of course." Though the telepath's guardians had explained, when Martha and the Doctor found her ship crashed on this damned barren rock, that such constant exposure to the aches and joys of all of humanity had nearly stripped her of the capacity to express her own emotion, he was sure he heard the tremor of humor in her voice.

It made him angry.

"Bit of rubbish, that." His half-joking tone vanished as he snapped his head erect, staring into the faded eyes of the old woman. "Not wisdom nor cowardice could keep me from her. I died to save her, burned a star to see her one last time, and would face down a fleet of Daleks for the chance to hold her hand again. I would walk through the void to find her. But there is no way back - not without a sacrifice too great to be considered." The fire in his eyes subsided, and ice took its place. "But you know all of that, don't you? No fair playing around in the brain of the man who's trying to save you, is it? Just not cricket." He closed his eyes for a moment. "Cricket. I'd kill for some celery."

Martha, coming in to report on the progress of the repair of the rest of the ship, overheard. "Celery? Think there might be some in the TARDIS." Her expression clearly showed that she was wondering if the Doctor was slightly mad. Or, rather, more mad than usual.

The Doctor blinked and shook his head. "No, 'squite all right. Just a spot of association. Anyway. That's done, then. All patched up. You ready for me to call in the technicians?" He asked the telepath, who smiled benignly at him.

"Please, Doctor. And remember, when you see her again... Do not fear."

He glared at her, growing frustrated, and gestured for Martha to call in the technicians who would install the telepath's brain into the heart of the ship. The TARDIS had, apparently, picked up on the woman's psychic distress signal and diverted what promised to be a highly enjoyable vacation on New Earth in order to bring them down on the outskirts of the crater the **Clytemnestra** had made when its navigation systems failed and it crashed into the barren planetoid. The telepath was almost entirely human - an anomaly in this era - but was nonetheless one of the strongest psychics he had ever had the misfortune to encounter. Those who had survived the wreck were largely members of a religious order that venerated human interconnection, and the telepath was a priestess of some sort or another. She had been trapped on the planetoid for a very long time, however, and there was no way for her or her followers to repair both their ship and her life support. 

"Thought you weren't much for singular conversation, anyway," he grumbled, ignoring her words and her warning. Her brilliant mind was so wide to the thoughts of others that she was rendered virtually helpless, able to process huge amounts of information in exchange for an inability to separate herself from her surroundings.

"You're rather... dominant, Doctor. With so few lifeforms nearby, your mind is a shout in an empty room." Again, that flicker of humor.

"Don't know as I like that." He finessed a few more small changes to the console, anything to keep his hands occupied.

"There is no reason you should. But it is not something to be liked or disliked, friend. It is merely what is." There was a slight twitch in the atrophied muscles of her neck that might have been intended as a shrug.

"You're about to die." The Doctor shook his head suddenly. "Sorry, that was rude. But I did have a point!" He almost blushed under the telepath's amused attention. "You've lived for a very long time, with a very large number of people running about inside your head. And you know as well as I do that I could fix up this ship so it could operate without you - patch together a navigation computer that would at least get your followers someplace safe. But instead you're choosing to live for what could be, essentially, forever. No human contact, nobody who understands, just guiding your people through space." He sat suddenly, back against the wall, and looked at her helplessly. "Why?"

She was silent for a very long time. When she finally spoke, there was such power and passion in her frail voice that he almost recoiled - there was rage and hope, pleasure and humor, despair and guilt curling around every syllable. She reminded him so much of himself that he swallowed reflexively, nearly frightened. "A circle and a seal, Doctor. I am near enough the end that I will change the beginning. Ask yourself: why does your TARDIS still fly?"

His jaw dropped. There were things every day that shocked the Doctor, little influences on the world that sparked interest, but there were implications in her words that were so heady that he could barely grasp at them.

"You can't mean that." His tone was spare, stating an apparent fact.

"If you say it, then it must be so." She closed her eyes. "I am tired, Doctor, and ready to begin my life anew."

The Doctor stared for a series of eternal moments, then nodded dumbly and left the room.

)))

"Well. That's done." The Doctor, freshly regenerated and freshly rejected by the first human to cross his path, spun dials and pressed levers until he was surrounded with the familiar hum of dematerialization. "Least you won't let me down."

"'Course I won't." The voice shocked him into immobility, rage flashing in his eyes until he focused on the speaker.

"Rose?" He shook his head, as if to clear his vision. The girl in front of him, leaning casually in the archway that led to the rest of the ship, looked much like the one he had just asked to accompany him. Except... not. She was thinner, muscles shifting silkily under her skin, her hair light brown and tied into a glossy knot at the nape of her neck. More, though, she didn't look around her with the same wide-eyed wonder as her counterpart. Something in her stance, her voice, her eyes, spoke to him of familiarity, called to him on an unexpected and unwanted level. It made him itchy. "What the hell're you doin' in my TARDIS?" He demanded.

"Thought I'd pass along some advice." She cocked her head, looking him over. "Lord, Doctor, but it is absolutely brilliant to see you!" She beamed then, that contagious smile he was already drawn to spreading over her face and almost drawing a twitch of response from his own lips.

"'M pretty sure you turned down my offer, just now," he jerked his thumb towards the closed TARDIS doors. "So why the newfound desire to get all chatty?"

Her grin was different, now. Cat-like. "Every once in a very long while, my Doctor, you make a mistake. Don't let tonight be one of them."

He cocked an eyebrow at her, waiting. The TARDIS wasn't objecting to her presence - something in her hum seemed to even be welcoming the intruder. Since Rose couldn't cause him bodily harm within his ship, he felt content to let her speak. Besides, the futuristic counterparts of silly little Earth-women who refused to travel with him so very rarely made themselves at home while he was out; the curiosity was killing him.

She laughed, then. "So dour. Bet it's killin' you, wonderin' what I'm doin' here." She approached him, held out her hand. Something flashed within it. "My key." She closed her fingers around it again, and winked. "Give 'er another chance, Doctor. You need her as much as she needs you."

"I've never been particularly ecstatic about being bossed around, especially by -"

"Glorified apes? Trained monkeys? Bipedal atrocities who've only achieved evolutionary ascendence due to overwhelming stubbornness and blind-headed stupidity?" She smirked. "Got a dozen more, if you don't like those. But it doesn't matter." Her eyes settled on him, and her smile faded. "Not tellin'. Just askin'. Please."

He looked her over. "Why's it so important?"

She stared at him. "Are you daft? She," and she pointed at the door, "in her nineteen-year-old idiocy, just turned down a chance to explore the universe with a Time Lord in what is probably the most wonderful ship ever built, grown, or dreamt of. But when I was her, you came back. And all the Mickeys and Mums in the world couldn't've stopped me a second time. If you don't go back?" She shrugged. "I'll never've seen the sun explode. I'll never've run from danger, saved the world - well, more'n once, anyway - or screwed up so badly only you could save me from myself. I'll probably spend my life workin' in a shop, maybe marry Mickey and be only mildly discontented with the rest of my life. But if you do go back?" She had been approaching him as she spoke, he suddenly noticed, and now she reached up, hands framing his face. Something was wrong, buzzing in the contact between their skin. Humming under her words. "If you go back, then we will fight, we won't understand each other, you'll call me a stupid ape, and I'll call you an insufferable alien git. But I will always have your back, and you will always have mine. You an' me, Doctor, against all that Time can throw at us."

He considered her, even after her hands dropped from his face. She just looked back, gaze calm and assuring. Finally, he grinned. That glorious, maniac grin that always led to trouble. "Took you to see the sun expand, did I? Sounds about right. Some place I can drop you?" He turned, hands poised over the TARDIS controls.

"Huh?" She hadn't expected to convince him so easily; maybe she hadn't needed to come at all.

"Figure you've been hangin' about since Earth, but I can't drop you off and pick up Rose at the same time. Bad things could happen." His eyes darkened, then he flashed a grin at her. "But I'm s'posin' you knew that, bein' all accustomed to the vagaries of time and space."

Rose nodded. "Not really an issue on a temporal level, but it's probably best she doesn't see me, anyway. Or me, her. That'd just be too many kinds of bizarre."

The Doctor fixed his attention on her. "Not really an issue? How's that?"

She winked. "Wouldn't you like to know?" She pressed herself up and away from the railing she had been leaning on, moving around him to check the console. "'F you could just drop me off by the Estate - y'know, where I used to live - that'd be brilliant."

The Doctor watched her, the casual reserve in her posture, the flaring wit in the curve of her mouth, the sparkle of intelligence in her eyes. She was keeping secrets, and big ones, if he was any judge - which, being all kinds of brilliant, he was - but she'd have to, wouldn't she? Have to keep him from mucking about with his own future, have to keep him from changing hers. And oh, yes, he'd noticed how utterly paradoxical it was that she was even here, convincing him to give her younger self a second chance. And he'd noticed how casually she had glossed over the fact.

But the Rose Tyler who had helped him destroy the Nestene Consciousness had wit, had verve, had courage and enthusiasm in spades, and he really had thought about going back for her - in a month or so, maybe, when she'd had some time to think - even before this new version popped by to give him a lecture. And the TARDIS liked her; he'd not heard her so content since Arcadia had burned. Altogether, he found he was suddenly excited about what was to come.

"Y'know, Rose Tyler, you're a bit of an enigma."

"Yeah," she grinned up at him. "And isn't it fantastic?"

)))

The Doctor dropped his spanner.

"Well, now. That was unexpected."

His hands mechanically plucked the spanner from the depths of the TARDIS and finished the adjustment he had been making. His mind turned the new information around. His mouth widened into an almost painful smile.

The Doctor let out a laugh and rushed from the control room, the TARDIS' song swelling ecstatically behind him.

"You knew!" He shouted as he rushed into the room he had only recently left. The telepath, still in her cradle of wires and tubing, rolled her eyes in his direction. Their gazes held for a moment, then an unused grin creaked onto her ancient face.

"I hoped," she laughed, drawing the attention of the technicians who were busying themselves with preparations for the upcoming surgery. They took in the scene and smiled, unconcerned with what had happened to make their priestess so unprecedentedly happy.

"Did you feel it? Can you read the change?" The Doctor was practically bouncing, now, hands flailing from the air to his hair and back again.

"I wouldn't doubt that they can read you back on Earth," she answered, cheekily.

"Oh, oh, oh!" He crowed, spinning in a jubilant circle. "Don't know how, don't particularly care. And that's a bit odd, 'cause I always care, don't I? She might've brought the universe tumbling down around her." He paused, and cocked a questioning eyebrow at the telepath.

The telepath arched a translucent eyebrow of her own. "We're still here, aren't we?"

"Yes! Yes we are!" He cackled, burying his hands in his hair and throwing his head back, dancing from foot to foot.

Martha, hearing his shouts, rushed in. "Doctor, what is it?"

He rushed to her and gathered her up, spinning her about. She grinned at his obvious good humor and staggered when he set her down.

"'S Rose! She's come back!"

Martha's face fell, but nobody but the telepath noticed. Quickly, though, she straightened her back and pushed down the jealousy that clung to her, turning her own smile on him. "So where is she, then?" She asked, looking around.

"Oh, not here, not here. She's in this universe!"

Martha recoiled. "And... she wasn't before?"

"Oh, didn't I tell you? Yes, yes. Very big problem. Sucked into another universe with no chance of return. But then there she was! My dearest Rose, turning impossible to improbable to done." He dropped onto his back on the floor and stared at the ceiling. "The bit about not caring was somewhat overstating things, though. I do wonder how she did it," he mused. "I mean, first she had to get back without tearing open the rift - which I couldn't do - and then she had to go back in time to see me..."

Martha loomed over him. "What d'you mean, see you?"

He popped up so that he was supporting the weight of his torso on his hands. "I mean my memories changed! But it happened while I was in the TARDIS, so I noticed." He closed his eyes, thinking through possibilities. "She must have been in the same timeline as me when I first left; if she was paying attention - thinking about me! I quite like that - she would have noticed her memories fading out. Of course, I went back for her on my own. Everything would have snapped back into place if she'd just left it for a bit. But she wouldn't have known that, must've thought I needed a push. So she stowed away and popped up at just the right moment, ready to give me a lecture. Me!" He grinned up at Martha, who merely looked at him.

"Was that supposed to make some kind of sense?"

"Oh, right. See, the first time I asked Rose to come along, she said no. Well, didn't really say no, just said she had to watch out for her mother and her lump of a boyfriend. Called him that, too! Lump. Great word."

"Doctor," Martha warned.

"Right, right. So anyway. I left, and originally I spent a few weeks wandering around the Dendarii Cluster - that lovely planet with the cannibalistic frog men, remember? - and decided to go back and ask her again. This time, though, I'd just shut the door and set the coordinates when she showed up in my control room and asked me to try again. Confused me to no end, too, all her weird little allusions. Lovely! Dunno if the brown hair suits her quite so well, though. But yeah, she convinced me to do what I was planning on anyway, and then had me drop her off in the park by her mum's before I went and picked the other her up."

Martha rolled his words over in her head. "So since the memory wasn't there before, she must've changed it now, right? And since she couldn't have done that from the other universe, she must be back in this one?"

"Exactly!" The Doctor leapt to his feet and resumed his pacing. "So now all we have to do is find her. Or wait until she finds me. Should be easy enough; she's obviously got transdimensional capability. Wonder if she'll run into Jack?"


End file.
